Murray Nossel (left) and Roger Weisberg Photo: Jeff Vespa

Weisberg joined Thirteen/WNET in 1977 as a producer of the Emmy-winning series Help Yourself. He produced dozens of programs on a broad range of subjects, including aging, domestic violence, juvenile justice, consumer fraud, health care, the environment, child welfare and urban poverty. Since 1980, he has written, produced and directed 22 PBS documentaries through his independent production company, Public Policy Productions. These documentaries have won more than 80 accolades, including Peabody, Emmy and duPont-Columbia awards. Some of Weisberg's films are vérité-style documentaries with no narration, while others are narrated by prominent actors such as Meryl Streep, Helen Hayes and James Earl Jones, as well as journalists such as Marvin Kalb, Jane Pauley and Walter Cronkite. While all of Weisberg's documentaries ultimately were broadcast on national public television, his 1993 documentary Road Scholar and his 1999 documentary Sound And Fury had broad theatrical releases before airing on PBS. Weisberg received an Academy Award nomination in 2001 for Sound And Fury and in 2003 for WHY CAN'T WE BE A FAMILY AGAIN? His current productions are Making Work Pay, about the struggles of low-wage workers to lift their families out of poverty, and Aging Out, about teens making the transition from foster care to independent living.

Murray Nossel, Ph.D.
Producer/Director

Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, Nossel trained and practiced as a clinical psychologist before immigrating to the United States in 1990. His foray into ethnographic filmmaking began in 1994, with a two-year project documenting the stories of persons with AIDS in New York. Nossel is on the teaching faculty of the Columbia University School of Social Work and in 1996 he embarked on an ethnographic inquiry into the Center for Family Life, a family support program in Brooklyn, New York. This research culminated in his doctoral dissertation about the anthropological implications of time in social work practice. In 1997, Nossel teamed up with Roger Weisberg to make a documentary about the Center for Family Life. This collaboration resulted in two films: A Brooklyn Family Tale and WHY CAN'T WE BE A FAMILY AGAIN? Nossel is also producer/director of Paternal Instinct, a vérité documentary to be aired on BBC and HBO which chronicles a gay couple's efforts to have a child with a surrogate mother. Apart from his role as a documentary filmmaker, Nossel is a founding member of 2 Men Talking, a storytelling performance which deals with issues of harassment, homophobia, anti-Semitism and AIDS. He has performed 2 Men Talking in theatrical settings in the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and Italy. In 2003, 2 Men Talking became part of an initiative to address issues of secrecy in South Africa's HIV/ AIDS epidemic.